Customer Reviews

Hieroglyph Detective: How to Decode the Sacred Language of the Ancient Egyptians

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I've been teaching myself Middle Egyptian from Allen's book but there's a difference between the clean and nicely formatted and fully formed sentences there and the stylized abbreviated inscriptions on the monuments pictured in this book. It's wonderful to see so many real examples in their original context and it's wonderful to see so much discussion devoted to each example. So I'd say this book is a must-buy for beginners in Middle Egyptian who want to read inscriptions, along with Collier and Manley.

One of the toughest things I've found is dealing with variations in ancient "handwriting". This book has really helped by displaying nicely formatted text alongside the original.

Seems like it might be a tough book for people not also studying hieroglyphs through another source. Without some familiarity, the ancient Egyptian habit of abbreviating words, reordering words, using random seeming "spellings", dropping grammatical endings and so on could make the amount of unsystematized information bewildering.

If you're looking for some supplemental hieroglyph reading, get this book.

But if you're looking for a taste of Egyptian hieroglyphs, but you're not yet ready for a heavyweight grammar, still get this book.

I hope we get a sequel.

I found this book entirely by accident and am very much glad I did for numerous reasons.

1) The formatting was beautifully done. I loved how there were real life examples side by side with the more stylized Egyptian font.

2) It was written clearly and was easy for the lay person to understand. It was in no way dry or boring and was not difficult to get through.

3) The Egyptian text examples that Strudwick chose to use have repeating phrases so by the time one finishes this book they have learned signs and vocabulary without even realizing this.

I highly recommend this book for anyone interested in learning about reading Egyptian Hieroglyphs.